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During a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session earlier this year, Microsoft founder and prolific philanthropist Bill Gates said his biggest regret in life is that he speaks only English. Not exactly what one would expect to hear from the billionaire founder of one of the largest tech corporations in the world.

Language immersion programs have been growing in Minnesota as more and more parents want their kids to learn another language. There were fewer than 30 programs in the state just ten years ago, and now there are more than 70. When you ask people on the street what second language they would want for their children, the answers range from Spanish, to Mandarin, to Russian, to even English.

Mayor de Blasio’s announcement that within 10 years all New York City public school students will take computer science classes is welcome news. But Java, Python and C++ are not the only languages critical for 21st century success. Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic and French are vital, too.

If technology is the future, Hong Kong needs to push for higher English standards to connect industry players to the rest of the world as the issue has been neglected for years and threatens the city's competitiveness.

Matthew Youlden speaks nine languages fluently and understands more than a dozen more. We work in the same office in Berlin, so I constantly hear him using his skills, switching from language to language like a chameleon changing colors. In fact, for the longest time I didn’t even know he was British.

SINGAPORE - Three committees that aim to encourage the learning and use of Chinese, Malay and Tamil here will get a 50 per cent boost in funding over the next five years, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced on Saturday (Sept 5).

Foreign language teachers have a job that can be tedious. Going over textbook grammar lessons on infinitives, possessives, indirect and direct objects, perfect and imperfect verbs, conjugations and so on can be a struggle for both educators and students.

All Russian students will be required to learn two foreign languages before graduation, Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov was cited as saying by the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Tuesday.

As the recent infographic below illustrates, the most widely used language on the internet is English, which is used on more than half of all the pages on the web. Those pages cover every style of English – business, conversational, scientific reports, news, sports, debates, local dialects and more – which makes the internet an ideal resource for interactive learning.